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| Saturday, May 4, 2002 |
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Or just wait another 5,000 years 
| | Walk outside tonight after sundown, just as the stars come out. Look West. |
| | The bright one above the horizon is Venus. The "star" below to the right is Mercury, a planet not much larger than our own moon. The brightest "star" not far above Venus is Saturn. Between them to the right is Mars. The brightest "star" above all those, 2/3 of the way toward the top of the sky, is Jupiter. |
| | These are all the visible planets. The rest never get brighter than background stars. |
| | This collection will only be around for the next few days. By summer all the planets will be gone from the evening sky. And they won't be collected like this again for a long, long time. |
| | So even if you're not into this stuff, check them out. It's your last chance to see a solar system, doing its thing. |
| | I'd point to a link for this, but I don't have the time. |
The function of beauty
Listen out
| | Not that I personally listen to internet radio. Based on my (probably faulty) understanding, to listen to internet radio I'd have to use Real Player. I hate the way that whatever version of the app I have is out of date and doesn't work right and the Real website makes me do stupid pretzel tricks to hunt past the pro (paid) version in order to find the tiny link to the free player. Then more than half the time, the .ram stream doesn't work anyway. Life's too short. I skip all that crap. But that's no reason to saddle internet broadcasters with exorbitant fees that the other broadcasters don't have to pay. |
| | I've found a lot of people who have the same misunderstanding — that you need a RealPlayer or a Windows Media Player to listen. |
| | In fact, many (perhaps most) of the Internet radio stations worth saving — perhaps most of them overall — run MP3 streams. You can hear those with a RealPlayer, but there are plenty of MP3 players for every platform, including Linux, and they don't come with the Real issues Susan talked about. |
| | Susan uses a Mac (I believe), which runs iTunes, a terrific player. It's not only free, but features a directory of stations called Radio Tuner. It misses a few, like public stations WUNC and WEMU, but it rocks in pretty much every other respect. (And you can add stations to your own directory.) |
| | For Windows, there's the ubiquitous WinAmp. |
| | And I can't talk about streaming without plugging the righteously patent-free Ogg Vorbis, which I predict everybody will be running eventually. |
Outgoing!
| | One of the graces of living near Vandenberg Air Force base is seeing the occasional rocket blast up into the sky, leaving a contrail that runs from Earth to space. The problem is, Vandenberg's Launch Schedule Page offers no specifics about timing. "Times shown are GMT and Pacific," it says, militarily. Then it offers no times at all. Just the month. Maybe that's a military thing too. |
| | So last night, after looking all over the place for some kind of clue, I gave up, went to bed, got up early and started looking again. |
And it's here today!
More on mediaism
| | From Mark Crispin Miller: |
| | The true cause of the enormous ills that now dismay so many Americans — the universal sleaze and 'dumbing down', the floodtide of corporate propaganda, the terminal insanity of United States politics — has risen not from any grand decline in the national character ... but from the inevitable toxic influence of those few corporations that have monopolized our culture. |
Nice rant
| | Which would you prefer? A McDonald's on every block, or food courts and neighborhood diners everywhere? |
| | A thought: the RIAA and the MPAA operate on the assumption of a prevailing mediaism. |
| | Another: mediaism is primarily about producers and consumers, not vendors and customers. It's about mass culture that is manufactured and delivered. |
| | What we call "consumerism" is really producerism. |
More of that ESP stuff?
| | My discussion list has its first spam. Three of them, in fact, all identical. |
Errorism
| | I make mistakes. Lots of them. Constantly. |
| | Observant readers are familiar with this. It's not just typos and spelling errors; it's whole missing hunks of paragraphs, and stretches of prose that don't quite make sense because the author clearly did half a cut & paste job. |
| | I also write out loud. I think with my fingers. My writing sometimes exemplifies what Garrison Keillor meant when he said English was "the preacher's language," because "it allows you to talk until you think of what to say." |
| | I'm still thinking about yesterday's last piece, "Mediaism." I believe that Big Media is about something that journalism is not. But what? I think I need to type out loud a bit more before I think of exactly what to say about that. Because I'm not happy with the case I made, or tried to make, yesterday. It didn't help that I couldn't seem to post through much of the day. Not sure why. |
| | Well, I'm also out of time. The next few days are mostly travel, work and getting ready to travel some more. Bear with me. |
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